Unnoticed London

From St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s it is but a few minutes’ walk back along the Strand to the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, that once served all the district, but it is now perhaps the tiniest parish in London west of Temple Bar. There it stands in its quiet graveyard, all that is left to remind us of “the fayrest manor in England.” The old palace of the Savoy was built by Simon de Montfort, that “Cromwell of the Middle Ages,” on land granted by Henry III. to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, for which the said Peter had to pay the not very exorbitant rent of three barbed arrows. Afterwards it came into the possession of the Dukes of Lancaster. Here it was, in 1357, that the Black Prince, riding on a little black hackney, brought his prisoner King John of France, who stayed here, with brief intervals, till his death, as nobody seemed able to raise the money for his ransom. And here lived John of Gaunt, with his numerous household, not least of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer. Later came Henry IV., who annexed the manor, and since his time it has always belonged in a particular manner to the reigning house.

Nothing is left, though, to tell of it, save the chapel, which was begun by Henry VII. in place of a more ancient one fallen into decay,—and that strange judicial survival, the Court Leet with view of Frankpledge of the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. Few people know that once a year the jury of the Court, headed by the Beadle with his silver-topped and carved staff of office, solemnly makes the round to inspect the boundary marks of the Manor. One is in Child’s Bank, another on the Lyceum stage, one in Burleigh Street, one by Cleopatra’s Needle, another in Middle Temple Lawn, where many scuffles have taken place in the past between the jurymen and indignant Benchers and officers of the Inns of Court concerning the question of trespass. The Court itself, which dates back to Saxon days, sits annually about Easter time, and still does “what is usually called everybody’s business, and nobody’s business,” as a former High Bailiff wrote.

The old Roman Bath in Strand Lane is a little beyond St. Clement Dane’s, and next to the Tube station. That belongs to a later chapter, but a short way further, on the same side of the road, is another bit of unnoticed London.

Prince Henry’s Room

Prince Henry’s room is one of those charming links with the past that lie unnoticed in the path of thousands who never stop to heed the story. At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the Law Courts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you see an eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobean room, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignified atmosphere. The Council of the Duchy of Cornwall is supposed to have once met here regularly and I believe that from time to time Prince Henry’s room is now used for the meetings of various associations, but if you visit it any day between ten and four you will almost certainly find no one to disturb the ghosts of bygone cavaliers but the war veteran who passes his days there ruminating on the delinquencies of historians.

The house is one of the oldest in the City. It was built in 1610, the year that Henry, the elder son of James I. of England, was created Prince of Wales; and the room is known as Prince Henry’s room. Look at the lovely Jacobean art of the panelling on the west wall, and the decorated plaster ceiling, where in the centre you will find the device of this lamented “prince of promise,” who died at the early age of eighteen.

Most people say, “Prince Henry! who was Prince Henry?” and very few connect the name with that little known prince who steals like a shadow across the pages of our history books. But his memory deserves to be kept green if only for the reason that he was a true friend to Sir Walter Raleigh, that unfortunate Victim of petty-minded James. After one of his visits to Raleigh in the Garden House of the Tower, Prince Henry said: “No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.” A stained glass window sets forth his titles in old French,

He was in many ways the prototype of our own Prince of Wales and held almost as high a place in the affections of his people. He was everything that a king’s son should be. He was handsome, well-grown and athletic; he was scholarly and brilliant, having all James’ love of learning without his folly and effeminacy. If he was a paragon of erudition, he also loved the practical side of shipbuilding, and he liked to give and receive hard knocks in the miniature tournaments that he organised at Whitehall, when he and his friends would engage the whole evening in mighty battles with sword and pike. And in addition to all this he seems to have had the generous mind and temper of the truly great. It is no wonder that his untimely death evoked a cry of mourning throughout England.

He was playing tennis, threw off his coat and caught a mortal chill. Everything that the doctors of that day could do was done. They even applied pigeons to his head and a split cock to his feet. Sir Walter Raleigh, who loved the youth, sent from his prison in the Tower the recipe of a potent “quintescence”; it did more good than the pigeons or the split cock, but could not save him. Prince Henry died in 1612, when not quite nineteen years of age.

This is what they wrote of him after his death:

The Temple

I know of a public school and university man who has lived all his life in London and protests that he has never seen Westminster Abbey: there are certainly hundreds of people who have never seen the Temple.

It would be a marvel to me that anyone should leave London without having wandered at least once in those courts, if I had not taken so long to find my own way there. One knows vaguely that it is a charming place, but going there is postponed for that fata morgana, a day of leisure, that recedes as it is approached, and time passes and the train whistles and steams slowly out of Euston or Victoria, leaving behind one of the very loveliest corners in old London,—so easy to reach it one had but tried.

You have only to turn through the old gatehouse that Wren built in 1684 to wander about in another world,—a world where it is possible to imagine dear Charles Lamb moving among his guests on a Wednesday evening, with Mary hovering in the background, or Goldsmith giving those rackety supper parties at No. 2 Brick Court that disturbed his studious neighbour Blackstone.

Few places in London are so filled with the memories of brilliant Englishmen as the Temple. If you want to know all about when and where

they lived, go to the wigmaker who conducts the Temple affairs from his little shop in Essex Court, and he will provide you with Mr. Bellot’s fascinating Story of the Temple.

Expert sightseers of course know all about it. They will tell you that Lamb was born in No. 2, Crown Office Row, and that Thackeray lived at No. 19; that Goldsmith died at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane, and that Johnson’s Buildings are on the site of Dr. Johnson’s rooms in Inner Temple Lane, and if you share their predilections you can go and peer at the actual bricks that have once sheltered these great men. But if you want to feel the real spirit of the place, unhampered by gazing at any particular pile of bricks and mortar, go to the old Temple Church on a Sunday morning.

Take any bus along the Strand past Temple Bar, where Dr. Johnson used to say that if he stationed himself between eleven and four o’clock, every sixth passer-by was an author,—and go through the second entrance to the Temple called Inner Temple Lane. Or else take the Underground to the Temple and, walking along the Embankment, go up the Essex Street steps and turn into the Temple courts by the first gate you find open, even if that means going round into Fleet Street.

The service in the Temple is an unforgettable revelation. There is no reason why psalms should not be sung in every Anglican church in the world as they are sung in the Temple, but no one seems to have thought of it, except the Temple choirmaster, who has trained his choristers to sing the words as if they had a profound meaning.

Has anyone ever found fitting phrases to describe the peculiar beauty of the Temple Church, with its carved Norman porch, that twelfth-century Round Church, where nine recumbent Crusaders rest in peace, and gleaming marble pillars support both the choir and the Round? It must be seen to be believed, but I pity the traveller who leaves London without seeing it.

In the courts of the Temple there lie embalmed so many stories of so many ages, that everyone finds what suits his fancy. You may wander as Spenser did among

Or you may choose a century later and go to York and Lancastrian times, and listen to Suffolk saying:

and Richard Duke of York’s reply,

and the Duke of Somerset:

It seems a pity that the Temple authorities do not so far unbend as to subscribe to the pretty legend by re-planting the gardens with red and white roses. It would give immense pleasure to countless transatlantic visitors, whose history books are fairly impartial on York and Lancastrian questions.

Then there are all the memories of gallant Elizabethan days, when the queen came and dined with the benchers in the great Middle Temple Hall and Twelfth Night was first performed here. It was by his dancing at one of the famous revels that the handsome youth Christopher Hatton first attracted the notice of Elizabeth, a moment when as our allies would say he lost a good chance of remaining quiet. The Hall is shown to visitors before twelve o’clock and after three on week-days and after church on Sundays. Peter Cunningham says the roof is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in London.

What feasts they had there in the days when lawyers had time to make merry. Here is the account of one old chronicler:

It sounds very cheerful and amiable, but it is difficult to imagine our modern lawyers passing round the hearth singing a carol.

I suppose that the three best-loved dwellers in the Temple were Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, and none of them were lawyers. Johnson was living in No. 1 Inner Temple Lane when Topham Beauclerk and Mr. Langton knocked him up at three in the morning to see if he could be persuaded to finish the night with them, and he came out with a poker, and his little black wig on, and said when he understood their errand, “What, is it you, you dogs, I’ll have a frisk with you.”

The story of Goldsmith’s tenancy of the Temple reminds one of the tales told of Balzac, whose tastes and weaknesses he shared. Always in financial difficulties, as soon as he made a little money he bought quantities of clothes and furniture and ran into debt to his tailor, perhaps for the very red velvet coat with lace ruffles that you may see to-day in the London Museum at Lancaster House. Goldsmith had many London lodgings and only came to the Temple in 1764. When he died there ten years later the staircase of this improvident, extravagant genius was crowded with the poor he had managed to help. No one seems to know exactly where he lies buried in the Temple churchyard.

Lamb was a true child of the Temple as he was born there. It may be heresy, but I have always wished he had not called it “the most elegant spot in the metropolis”; he loved it more than that, as all readers of The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple know well.

No one leaves the Temple without pausing in Fountain Court, where Ruth Pinch used to meet Tom. It is by far the most charming of all the courts of the Temple. “I lived in Fountain Court for ten years,” wrote Arthur Symons, “and I thought then and I think still, that it is the most beautiful place in London.”

CHAPTER IV

ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER

There is very little left of the city that the old Romans called Augusta and the older Britons Llyn-Din—that some say means “the Lake Fort” and some “The Hill by the Pool.” In the Guildhall and London museums there are statues and vases and ornaments and mosaic pavements belonging to those times, but in the city streets there are hardly any traces to-day of the Roman occupation. Watling Street, a piece of Roman road that still bears an Anglo-Saxon name, runs citywards from the back of St. Paul’s, but that may better be reached from Cheapside. Most of the Roman wall that remains is now below ground level. The best places to see what is visible are in St. Olave’s, Hart Street; at Trinity Place, Tower Hill; at Barber’s bonded warehouses in Cooper’s Row; and at The Roman Wall House at No. 1, Crutched Friars, a new building whose plans were altered by the Sadlers’ Company so as to preserve a good specimen of the old wall in one of the basement rooms.

I began my search for Roman remains in Strand Lane, which lies next door to the Strand station on the Holborn tube, and can be reached either by bus along the Strand or by District train to the Temple, whence you go uphill up Arundel Street and, turning to your left along the Strand, find it after two or three minutes’ walk. Half-way down the little winding passage that once led to the waterside there is on the left a dingy sign, “The Old Roman Bath.”

The English reputation for liking cold baths must have been a legacy from the Romans. Time was when the venerable cold spring bath was used daily. David Copperfield had many a cold plunge in it when he was living in Peter the Great’s house at the lower end of Buckingham Street. But now it is only open from 11 to 12 on Saturday mornings to the very occasional visitor who turns aside to look at this 2,000-year-old relic of the London of the past.

As in the Frigidarium of the Cluny Museum in Paris, it seems as if one steps back into the world as Julius Cæsar knew it, across the threshold into the little vaulted chamber where the waters from the spring, once famed for miraculous cures, flow through the marble walls of the identical bath used by our Roman conquerors. The Romans contented themselves with a brick lining that still exists under the marble slabs, but the latter have an interest of their own, for they came from the famous bath built in the Earl of Essex’s house near by, which Queen Bess herself is said to have been the first to use. The spring comes from the old Holy Well, that gave its name to Holywell Street, on the North side of the Strand, a street destroyed to make room for Kingsway and Aldwych.

There is a Roman bath of a different kind underneath the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street, but on your way to this from the Temple station (or bus 13 from the Strand), get out at Cannon Street, where in a sort of cage against the wall of St. Swithin’s Church, directly opposite the station, is the very oldest relic in the whole of the city of London,—London Stone, the stone that the Romans set up to mark the centre of the city; the starting point from whence they marked the miles along their branching highways. As long as history has been written in this land, there has been mention of London Stone. Do you remember how, in Henry VI., Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself King of the City, striking his staff against the block? Once it was a big pillar and set on the other side of the way, but famous stones are seldom allowed to rest in peace, and time, the weather, and clumsy mediæval cart-wheels have chipped and worn it to its present size.

Now take the train again, or another 13 bus, and go on to the Monument, where King William IV. stands on the very spot where Falstaff and Prince Hal made merry at the “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. Going down by the beautiful column which Sir Christopher Wren built to commemorate the Great Fire, hard by where it started in Pudding Lane, turn to your left in Lower Thames Street opposite the church of St. Magnus, and walk along this unattractive causeway till you come to the Coal Exchange with its Corinthian porch. You will find the porter through a door up the side-street of St. Mary-at-Hill. Do not go on Monday, Wednesday or Friday afternoons, for those are marketdays or whatever the correct term is on Coal Exchanges, and, as that most agreeable porter explained to me: “We found it didn’t do, Ma’am; for when the genelmen on the Exchange see me taking a lady or genelman or it might be a party down below into the cellar, they naturally says to me ‘What for?’ And when I say ‘Roman bath,’ they say ‘Roman bath, Jones! Did you say Roman bath? You don’t mean to say there’s a Roman bath below and me here forty years and never know it!’ And down they goes with all their friends, all equally surprised, and business gets neglected. That’s how it is, Ma’am.”

Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone to wish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday afternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweating chamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaborate system of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in the Strand.

The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, was only built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two more unexpected links with the past. I am indebted to Messrs. Thornbury and Walford for pointing out that the black oak used in the woodwork is part of a tree, four or five centuries old, that was discovered in the River Tyne, and the blade of a dagger in the shield of the City arms is made of wood from a mulberry tree that Peter the Great planted when he worked as a shipwright in Deptford Harbour.

Turning up St. Mary’s-at-Hill into Great Tower Street, I found, nearly opposite All Hallows, Barking, a prosperous merchant’s house still standing practically untouched, as it was built a year or two after the Great Fire. At No. 34, an ordinary-looking archway leads into a courtyard fronting a perfect example of the home of a wealthy citizen of Charles II.’s time. A flight of steps leads up to the doorway, from which you catch a glimpse of panelled walls and noble staircase. The counting-house is on the right, and upstairs are the living rooms where the merchant lived with his wife and family and servants, in the fashion of those times. They entertained, too, after the day’s work was done, for amongst the private papers still treasured here is one complaining of the excessive noise of carriages and coaches turning in the cobbled courtyard at night.

It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-century perpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see the Norman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of the litany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory of William Thynne and his wife.

This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in Westminster Abbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefe clerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first edition of the entire works of Chaucer. Both of them are descendants of that John of the Inn whose soubriquet became the name of the Bath family.

All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of the seventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerful lady,—one of the four abbesses who was a baroness ex officio, and she held the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share of men-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eight miles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of the nunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived the Great Fire and is still intact.

Turning your back on the old church, and walking up Seething Lane, where Pepys went to live in 1660 and kept his diary for nine years, you come to St. Olave’s Church on the corner of Hart Street, where his pretty young wife was buried. Church manners have vastly changed since Pepys’ day. When a bomb from an avion fell just outside the Verdun Cathedral one Sunday morning, two months before the big attack, no one turned his head except one little acolyte, who couldn’t resist a surreptitious grin at his comrade in the front pew. But listen to Pepys:

The church of St. Olave’s has a proud history. There are records of the parish in Henry I.’s day, and in 1283 of a church dedicated to St. Olaf, an exiled Norwegian. The present building dates from about 1450. It is one of the eight existing churches that escaped the Great Fire.

The mid-Victorian Vandals who filled up the marble crypt, and removed the old galleries and square pews, with their candlesticks, have mercifully left the fine roof intact, and St. Olave’s possesses a number of quaint Elizabethan treasures. On the door there is one of the few remaining sanctuary knockers used by a fugitive from justice if he wanted to claim sanctuary protection: on four of the six bells in the church peal is engraved “Anthony Bartlet made mee 1662.” The crown on the weather vane is supposed to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1554 when she gave silken bell-ropes as a thank-offering for her release from the Tower, and on the front of the organ gallery are the wrought-iron hat-stands with which the clergy of those days emphasised their protest against men wearing their hats in church.

The beautifully wrought iron sword-stands are used to this day when the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs attend an official service at St. Olave’s. The old church has been intimately connected with the navy since the days when the Admiralty lodged in Mark Lane and Crutched Friars, and it is still the parish church of the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, who come humbly on foot, via Catherine Court and Seething Lane, to the annual special service on Trinity Sunday, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, as Master, making his pilgrimage like the rest.

But for the ordinary visitor who has no part in these ceremonial happenings the great interest of St. Olave’s lies in the memories connected with its greatest parishioner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary to the Admiralty.

The fame of his Diary has rather obscured Pepys’ well-merited reputation as an admirable and faithful public servant at a time when these qualities were rare. He was living at the Navy Office in Seething Lane in 1666, and it is thanks to his sagacity in ordering all the workmen from the Royal Dockyards to blow up the intervening houses that St. Olave’s, Hart Street, Allhallows Staining, and Allhallows Barking were saved from the Great Fire.

Pepys and his pretty wife are both buried in their parish church of St. Olave’s. Mrs. Pepys died when she was only twenty-nine, and though he had teased the jealousy of “my wife, poor wretch,” Pepys ordered her bust to be carved, not in the usual profile, but with the lovely head turned so that he could see

it from where he sat in his gallery pew on the other side of the church.

There are other interesting things to be seen at St. Olave’s: the doorway to the old churchyard that Dickens-lovers will recognise from his description in the Uncommercial Traveller, the carved pulpit and quaint vestry and several fine old monuments, and, as I mentioned before, part of the old Roman wall.

If you have no passion for discovering bits of ancient walls, there are other more beautiful things near the bottom of Seething Lane. One of them is very new, so new that when I saw it all the scaffolding had not been removed from the buildings at its base—I mean the great tower of the Port of London Authority. I hear that Sir Joseph E. Broodbank has just written a fascinating History of the Port of London, that will waken everyone who has three guineas to spare to the interest of London’s immense docks and the organisation that has power over seventy miles of the Thames. The beautiful tower of the new buildings, with its fine groups of statuary, is worth a special pilgrimage to see. It is not very far from Trinity House, that unique institution that, as Mr. Cunningham says, has for its object “the increase and encouragement of navigation, the regulation of lighthouses and sea marks, and the general management of matters not immediately connected with the Admiralty.”

The Guild of Trinity House was founded in 1529 by Sir Thomas Spert, Henry VIII.’s Controller of the Navy and commander of the magnificent four-master, the Harry Grace de Dieu, which took the King to Calais on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. You can see exactly what it looked like in the picture of Henry VIII.’s embarkation at Dover that hangs in Hampton Court Palace.

One of the delusions I have had when hastening through the streets of London filled with excitement at the thought of seeing some ancient place associated with more colourful days than our own, was caused by Mr. Wagner’s enticing account of the Crooked Billet in his fascinating book on old London inns.

Alas, the Crooked Billet, at the eastern extremity of Tower Hill, has nothing left of its former magnificence. The panelled walls and carved chimney-pieces have been ruthlessly taken away,—some say to that bourne overseas whither pass so many treasures of the Old World it affects to despise. There is nothing left but the sordid dirty rooms of slum tenements, with here and there the remains of a fine ceiling and a few wall cupboards. The old building that was once a royal palace, and since the days of Henry VIII. has been a lordly inn, has fallen into the state of drab degradation that is the forerunner of the pick and shovel of the démolisseur. Only the rich façade remains to remind the passer-by of its vanished glories!

The Tower

Having wandered so long in its neighbourhood, let me hurriedly make the shamefaced confession that I share Richard III.’s opinion about the Tower and that I have never seen it. I have skirted it, I have gazed into its asphalted moat, I have looked with awe on its battlemented towers,—but I have never crossed the drawbridge.

To me it is the storehouse of mistakes—a place redolent with the memory of bygone blunders—where the great men of the nation, like Sir Thomas More, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent, beautiful things like the little Princes and Lady Jane Grey, were done to death. There must surely be left something of Lady Jane’s agony when she saw the headless body of her young husband carried past her on the morning when she knew that she too was to die—something of the sickening sense of injustice that great men like Raleigh and More must have felt as their doom approached.

Of course, for less squeamish people there is an unending interest in the historical and architectural features of the Tower. It is open every week-day from ten to six in summer and ten to five in winter, and on Saturdays the fees to the White Tower and the Jewel House are not necessary. It is staffed by a constable, a lieutenant, a resident governor and about 100 yeomen warders called Beefeaters, all of which information, as well as the fact that the best way to reach it is from Mark Lane station on the Underground, is writ large in Mr. Muirhead’s excellent Blue Book on London.

Writ more small are tales that almost make me want to go and see for myself the place where Charles d’Orleans, the royal French poet, who wrote such haunting songs as “Dieu qu’il la fait bon regarder,” was held a prisoner for fifteen long years. Other things it seems besides murders happened in the Tower,—Henry the Eighth made two of his marriages here, James the First lived here for a time (a fact that does not mitigate my distaste for the Tower), and

Charles the Second slept here the night before his coronation in 1661. No monarch has done that since his day. Then, if guide-books may be believed, there are hundreds of things in the armouries and weapon room and small-arms room, the cloak on which Wolfe died in far-off Quebec, a Grinling Gibbons carved head of Charles the Second, and armour and weapons of every period.

Most of these historic places are sepulchres of bygone crimes, but the Tower has known tragedy within its walls in these latter hideous years, for nearly a score of our enemies were put to death there in the Great War.

One or two of them were brave men, serving their country even as we served ours; one likes to think that they were treated as such. The story of Carl Lody has already been published, but I give it again because it redeems some of the Tower’s tragic history.

I believe he had asked to be allowed to testify to the fair and just treatment he had received, and when the last moment came the German said to the Provost-Marshal: “I suppose you wouldn’t care to shake hands with a spy?” The Englishman replied without hesitation, “I am proud to shake hands with a brave man.”

CHAPTER V

ROUND ABOUT CHEAPSIDE

But in Cheapside it is easy to call up memories of noisy apprentices and busy trafficking. Here is the home of the true Cockney, born within the sound of those bells of Bow Church that still chime as cheerfully as when Dick Whittington heard them from Highgate Hill, or when they summoned dilatory citizens to bed at nine o’clock. The very name evokes the idea of buying and selling, even if one does not know that the old word “chepe” means a market. It was once the shopping centre of the City of London, and the names of the streets branching off on either side, Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane and the rest, are the names of the various commodities that were sold there. Friday Street was so called from the fish to be bought there on a Friday. Round about, in Ironmonger Lane, Bucklersbury, and most of the streets on the northern side, busy artisans worked at their trades, and if we think it a noisy thoroughfare nowadays, what must it have been when it was paved with cobblestones and thronged all day long with an endless stream of horsemen, carts and coaches, vociferating porters, citizens cheerful or quarrelling as the case might be, sellers calling their goods on either hand, and the bells of innumerable churches, priories and religious houses clanging incessantly to prayer. Always there was something going on in Chepe—a tournament to see, with stands set up at the side of Bow Church, or pageants, cavalcades and processions passing by. The London youth of those days had a diverting life. Read what Chaucer says of the prentice in Edward III.’s reign:

We have most of us read in our history books of the “beau geste” of Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III., in saving the lives of the burghers of Calais; this seems to have been a habit that started early with her. In 1330, just after the birth of the Black Prince, a tournament was held in Cheapside to celebrate the event, and a fine wooden tower erected to accommodate the young queen and her ladies. No sooner had they mounted than it collapsed. There was much screaming and a scene of terrible confusion, from which they all emerged, however, more frightened than hurt. The king was so enraged that he ordered the instant execution of the careless workmen, but Philippa, who might well have been even more annoyed, at once flung herself on her knees and pleaded for their pardon until the king forgave them.

But “Safety first” was a motto with King Edward, he wanted no more wooden scaffoldings. A stone platform was built, just in front of the old church of St. Mary-le-Bow (making it extremely dark on the street side), from which he and his court could view the tournaments with minds at peace; for centuries this was the regular royal stand, whenever there was a procession or other fine doings in the City. Look at Bow Church, that glory of Cheapside, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and, in the stone gallery running round the graceful steeple, you will see how, ever mindful of tradition, he commemorated this fact when he built his new tower to flank the pavement adjoining the site of the old grand-stand.

When I last went into Bow Church I chatted with the lady who was engaged in scrubbing the floor, and she told me the curious fact that in this English church in an English city, with its memories stretching through the ages (for it is built on the site of a much older one and you may still see the fine old Norman crypt), the Russians in London were then assembling, Sunday by Sunday, for a service in their own ritual, St. Mary’s congregation amiably going to another church near by. The City Churches that were missed so sorely, after the Great Fire, by the merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, apprentices, with their families, maids and servants, who lived all round about them and dutifully worshipped there, now stand empty and neglected. Here and there, as in the tiny fourteenth-century church of St. Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate Street, the magnet of eloquent wisdom and sincerity draws men and women from all over London to worship, so that the seats are never empty, but in the majority of the City churches, a perfunctory service connotes a perfunctory congregation of caretakers and their wives, inhabitants of a quarter that is only populated in the working week-day hours. The best time to see any of the City churches is at the lunch hour, when they are sure to be open. In many of them short musical services are then held. I know few odder sensations than to walk in the City on a Sunday morning and hear all the sweet bells of the fifty-odd churches calling to prayer in the silence of the solitary streets. Practical people would pull the half of them down and devote the money from the sale of their sites to other much-needed religious purposes. But, even if these little churches no longer serve their original object, they are still shrines of the past, each one with some special memory, some special charm, and typical all together of a great phase of English architecture.

There is little of this past now actually left in busy Cheapside, except No. 37, of which I shall speak presently, two tiny houses at the corner of Wood Street, the handsome seventeenth-century façade (restored, of course) of the Mercers’ Chapel at the corner of Ironmonger Lane at the Lower Bank end, and No. 73 opposite, that was built by Wren for Sir William Turner who was Lord Mayor in 1668. It is still known as the Old Mansion House.

Probably it was his own house and he went on living in it till his death. Where, then, did the lord mayors stay officially during their term of office from that time till the present Mansion House was built in 1739? I am indebted to Mr. Leopold Wagner for supplying the answer by showing me the way to one of the most fascinating spots in the City. This third old Mansion House still exists, but in a corner so obscure, so tucked away, that I have passed within a stone’s throw of it a dozen times and never had the least suspicion of its existence.

It is at No. 5, Bow Lane, hard by Bow Church, in a narrow passage, with a sign directing you, if you are fortunate enough to see it, to Williamson’s Hotel. Follow the passage and you will find yourself remote from the world, with the quaintest old creeper-clad Restoration house imaginable surrounding three sides of the courtyard. Yet this quiet spot was once the hub of civic life,—there is a stone let into the charming little octagonal-shaped parlour (now called the reading room) that is supposed to mark the very centre of the City. Here for a few years the lord mayors after Sir William Turner dwelt in state, and here came William III. and Mary to dine, and give, as a memento of their visit, the handsome iron gates, now much corroded and covered with thick green paint, through which you seek the entrance.

Later on, in the early seventeen hundreds, the original Williamson started his hotel. It would have been described as “high-class residential,” had they known those terms, for in those days, when country squires and their families came up to town, they found the City as convenient a centre as anywhere. The forty bedrooms, the long salon, now a bar, where you may see, still hanging on the wall where it has been for centuries, an ancient map of London Bridge,—the pleasant rambling up-and-down passages, with their deep embrasures and window-seats, the low-ceilinged coffee-room with its only bell-pull marked “Boots,” and elegant little parlour where now no ladies ever sit,—all speak of a past of consequence.

But nowadays, apart from the birds of passage who pass a night in the huge station caravanserais, does anyone put up in the City? Only a few “commercials,” such as I saw lunching at Williamson’s, on the very excellent “ordinary” of lamb, green peas, new potatoes, cauliflower, cherry tart and cheese, winding up with coffee, liqueur and a fat cigar, over which they discuss the latest prices, and the latest sporting news. Williamson’s, in fact, does not cope with modern notions—“Take it or leave it” is their motto. The all-invading business girl has not yet dared to put her nose in here—she would probably create a revolution if she did. But if you want to get right back into the atmosphere of Dickens, in a place where electric bells, smart waitresses, music, flappers and foolish ideas of the value of time are not, conscript a friend and take a meal at the Old Mansion House.

Coming out into Bow Lane, on the right, at the opposite corner where Watling Street crosses it, you will find the Old Watling Restaurant, one of the first houses built in London after the Great Fire: a very delightful example of its kind, with its dormer windows and heavy-beamed ceilings.

In Cheapside, at No. 37 at the corner of Friday Street, where Messrs. Meakers carry on a business appropriate enough to the shop that tradition assigns to John Gilpin, is another house that claims, on the insufficient evidence of an undated cutting from the Builder, to have been standing even before the Fire.

Everything goes to refute this story. The very beautiful staircase dates from the Restoration period, the brickwork is similar to that of other buildings erected at this time, but, more than this, it is quite certain that the house stands on the site of the older “Nag’s Head,” a tavern with an overhanging timbered structure, that may be seen in a print of Cheapside showing the procession to welcome Marie de Medici when she came in 1638 to visit her daughter Henrietta Maria. The sign on the frontage now is no Nag’s Head, but a Chained Swan, once the heraldic badge of King Henry IV., but debased, like so many other noble devices, to become the sign of a hostelry. Innkeepers were fond of calling their houses after the swan, for this poor bird has always had an undeserved reputation for being fond of strong drink; on the other hand, it holds a special place in English history, for when Edward III., jousting at Canterbury in 1349, put on his shield the device of a white swan with the motto: